EXACTLY one-half century ago, one of the great confrontational moments of the cold war seized the world’s attention: Nikita Khrushchev, bombastic anti-capitalist leader of the Soviet Union, and Richard Nixon, vice president of the United States with the reputation of a hard-line anti-communist, came to rhetorical grips in the model kitchen of the “typical American house” at the 1959 American exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow.

I was in that kitchen, not because I then had anything to do with Nixon, the exhibition’s official host, but as a young press agent for the American company that built the house. The exhibit was designed to show Russians that free enterprise produced goods that made life better for average Americans. However, my client’s house was not on the official tour.

Instead, “Nik and Dick,” as the adversaries were promptly dubbed, were steered into the RCA color television exhibit, a consumer marvel at the time. This display of technical superiority must have irritated the Russian leader, who noticed the taping going on and demanded “a full translation” of his remarks be broadcast in English in the United States. Nixon, in his role as genial host, readily agreed, expressing a hope for similar treatment of his remarks in Russia.

Khrushchev then promptly denounced a recent proclamation by the United States of “Captive Nations Week” — dedicated to praying for “peoples enslaved by the Soviet Union” — as an example of thoughtless provocation. “You have churned the water yourselves,” he warned the vice president. “What black cat crossed your path and confused you?” Then he wrapped his arms around a nearby Russian workman: “Does this man look like a slave laborer?”

Nixon, trying to be Mr. Nice Guy, noted that Russian and American workers had cooperated in building the exhibition and added: “There must be an exchange of ideas. After all, you don’t know everything — ” At which point Khrushchev snapped, “If I don’t know everything, you don’t know anything about communism — except fear of it.” On the defensive, Nixon said, “The way you dominate the conversation ... if you were in the United States Senate you would be accused of filibustering.”

Coming out of the RCA studio and being led into the innocuous Pepsi exhibit, Nixon looked glum; by playing the gracious host in the face of an aggressive debater, he had made a mistake soon to be replayed by leaders around the world. His military aide, Maj. Don Hughes, was looking around for a venue — off the planned route — where the vice president could regroup in front of the crowd of reporters.

I hollered at Major Hughes, “This way to the typical American house!” He didn’t hesitate, steering Nixon, Khrushchev and their entourages off the path and toward the structure we called “the Splitnik,” because it had a path cut through the middle to allow crowds to walk through the interior.

Problem: the momentum of the following crowd threatened to push the party all the way through the house without stopping. Thanks to Gilbert Robinson, a coordinator of the exhibition (and later head of State Department public diplomacy in the Reagan years), I arranged to make a certain section of fence disappear, allowing a crowd from the other side to spill in and trapping the official party inside the house. Nixon made a beeline to the railing that exposed the kitchen.

Nixon: “I want to show you this kitchen. It’s like those of houses in California. See that built-in washing machine?”

Khrushchev: “We have such things.”

Nixon: “What we want to do is make more easy the life of our housewives.”

Khrushchev: “We do not have the capitalist attitude toward women.”

Next problem: during this opening banter, I was in the kitchen, but the principals’ backs were to the reporters, who couldn’t hear. Harrison Salisbury of The Times, who spoke Russian, was trying to squeeze past burly Russian guards into the kitchen; I explained to them that he was the refrigerator demonstrator. They let Harrison in; he sat on the floor and took notes for the press pool.

Because the Russian press had derided the American claim that the house was affordable to workers — calling it “a Taj Mahal” — Nixon noted that this house cost $14,000, and a government-guaranteed veterans mortgage made it possible for a steelworker earning $3 an hour to buy it for $100 a month. Khrushchev was sarcastic: “We have peasants who also can afford to spend $14,000 for a house.”

Nixon eventually steered the topic of competition to weapons. “Would it not be better to compete in the relative merit of washing machines than in the strength of rockets?”

“Yes, but your generals say we must compete in rockets,” responded the Soviet leader. “We are strong and we can beat you.”

Nixon, aware that the Soviets then led the United States in rocket thrust, finessed that: “In this day and age to argue who is stronger completely misses the point. With modern weapons it just does not make sense. If war comes we both lose.”

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Khrushchev started to interrupt, but Nixon pressed: “I hope the prime minister understands all the implications of what I just said ... Whether you place either one of the powerful nations in a position so that they have no choice but to accept dictation or fight, then you are playing with the most destructive power in the world.”

Khrushchev fell silent, and Nixon continued: “When we sit down at a conference table it cannot be all one way. One side cannot put an ultimatum to another.”

Khrushchev: “Our country has never been guided by ultimatums ... It sounds like a threat.”

Nixon: “Who is threatening?”

Khrushchev: “You want to threaten us indirectly. We have powerful weapons, too, and ours are better than yours if you want to compete.”

Nixon: “Immaterial ... I don’t think peace is helped by reiterating that you have more strength than us, because that is a threat, too.”

As Nixon gained strength in the debate and his opponent grew defensive, Elliott Erwitt of Magnum Photos talked his way past the guards and captured Nixon gently jabbing his finger into the surprised Khrushchev’s chest.

The guards eventually caught on to my entry trick, and when I tried to get the Associated Press photographer Hans Von Nolde in as “garbage disposal unit demonstrator,” it turned out that General Electric did not have such an appliance in that low-cost kitchen. In desperation, Hans lobbed his camera over the heads of the debaters into my arms. When I thought the shot was taken, I tossed the camera back. “You had your finger over the aperture, idiot!” shouted Hans, and passed it back, drawing glares from the guards.

More careful this time, I composed a shot with Nixon gesticulating and Khrushchev listening (and including my boss’s wife, Jinx Falkenburg, in the background). A beefy Russian bureaucrat elbowed his way into the picture and I couldn’t crop him out without losing the washing machine on the right. I clicked the shutter, including all the Kremlin big shots and the interloper (catching him with his eyes closed; served him right). The Associated Press quickly put it on its wire service before Russian censors could clamp down on transmissions, making their leader look less than dominant, and it made front pages around the world.

WESTERN news coverage made Nixon the winner of what Salisbury had originally slugged “the Sokolniki summit” but Harrison was willing to change that slug-line to the equally alliterative “kitchen conference” at my plea (my client was the house builder, not Nixon and certainly not the Russian park). Curiously, when the RCA television tape of the first part of the confrontation was telecast days later — in which a friendly Nixon had let Khrushchev push him around — the relatively small audience watched it with the mindset from the press that Nixon had “stood up to the bully.” The print message had already penetrated, especially when reinforced by the Erwitt photo of Nixon’s finger jab.

As madcap as many of the sidelights of that day were, they took place against a tense backdrop. The Soviet leadership, already master of much of Europe and then allied with China, was determined to dominate the world, to spread communism and undermine capitalism; that was no myth, and the ultimate victory of the West over that spread of dictatorship was by no means as certain as it seems in hindsight.

At such a moment, the leadership’s assessment of its main opponent’s will to resist — if necessary, to fight — becomes a major factor in national strategy. Intelligence agencies strain to get such top-level personal assessments right. The shrewd Khrushchev came away from his personal duel of words with Nixon persuaded that the advocate of capitalism was not just tough-minded but strong-willed; he later said that he did all he could to bring about Nixon’s defeat in his 1960 presidential campaign.

After John F. Kennedy won, the new president had a June 1961 summit meeting in Vienna with Khrushchev, and gloomily told the Times reporter James Reston afterward that “he just beat the hell out of me.” Assessing Kennedy as a soft touch, Khrushchev put up the Berlin Wall and then shipped Soviet missiles to Cuba; it took that nuclear confrontation to show the Russian that his personal assessment of Kennedy’s will was quite mistaken.

A few hours after the kitchen conference, at our ambassador’s residence, I was introduced to Nixon, who showed his grasp of capitalism’s priorities by commenting, “We really put your kitchen on the map, didn’t we?” At a state dinner 13 years later, accompanying President Nixon to Moscow as a speechwriter, I recognized the bureaucrat who had pushed his way into my kitchen picture and ultimately to the top of the Communist heap: Leonid Brezhnev.

William Safire, a former Times Op-Ed columnist, writes the “On Language” column in The Times Magazine.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on , on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: The Cold War’s Hot Kitchen. Today's Paper|Subscribe